Comics! A Grand Old Time!

As the new year begins, the dust settles in the company continuities of both Marvel and DC, and the editors of their super-hero comics evidently decide (or were ordered by their masters, now newly sensitized to the lure of Hollywood money?) to put away the dark backdrops of the past few years and embrace a somewhat simpler, somewhat brighter outlook.

Of course this will appeal to me, although I'm the first to admit some good stories came out of all that darkness. At DC, there were several back-to-back 'dark' events - most recently the "Darkest Night" mini-series that started with lots of superheroes getting violently killed but ended with lots of superheroes getting brought back to life. And at Marvel, the storyline in which villainous Norman Osborn gained political ascendancy in America and drove all the heroes into hiding (or into maximum security prison cells) led to some fantastic comics; I griped about it at the time, but the fact is, having evil win a big round led to a lot of great stories and great moments - and of course the ultimate pay-off, the story in which Osborn finally gets his comeuppance.

Both those story-arcs are over now (well, "Blackest Night" continues to limp forward as "Brightest Day," but although it's better than it seems, its ultimate worth remains to be seen - right now, its main purpose seems to be to re-introduce DC readers to the 'classic' Aquaman and invent a supporting cast of friends and enemies for him, perhaps as prelude to giving him a comic of his own again), and both companies are free to return to straight-up superhero stories, which is fine by me. A major beneficiary at Marvel is Spider-Man, whose comic is at a high point it hasn't reached in years.

But like I said, I'm also a beneficiary! For instance, I'm back in time 50 years, back to getting Adventure Comics and Superboy every month. True, things have changed - the Legion of Super-Heroes I'm reading in Adventure Comics is now a group of adults, not perky teens, but writer Paul Levitz and artist Geraldo Borges are making it all great anyway (and DC's got another Legion title for stories from the group's youth, so I really can't complain); and the Superboy I'm reading about isn't Clark Kent when he was a teenager, it's Connor Kent, a dreamy hunk-clone of Superman (with a little of Lex Luthor spliced in - yes, this Superboy has two daddies) - but I confess, despite the weird artwork (everybody has such eeensy-weeensy facial features)(but alas, Humberto Ramos can't draw everything), this title is growing on me.

And DC is at least partially acknowledging their bright new day with a series of  covers designed to highlight the iconic nature of their characters, which is neat. Superboy's cover features him flying straight at the reader, followed by his faithful companion Krypto the super-dog, and the cover of Adventure features the Legion logo (which bears a very encouraging resemblance to the logo of a certain literary magazine...) and five grim, anorexic stick-figures who, I guess, are supposed to represent several of the sexy women of the Legion. I mostly concentrated on that wonderful logo.

Over at Marvel, there's considerably more darkness to overcome. It's not just the year-long power-grab of Norman Osborn - that power-grab was only made possible by the events of Marvel's 'Civil War,' in which Tony Stark/Iron Man spearheaded a government initiative to register every super-hero, pay them a government wage, and dictate what they do with their super-powers. Captain America died at the climax of that story, which is about as dark as dark gets, and eventually Osborn chased Tony Stark from power and took over himself - so once the 'big three' of Marvel's super-team the Avengers, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man - were reunited, you'd expect lots of hard feelings all around.

Writer Brian Michael Bendis obviously decided the big three needed a private adventure in which they could heal their fractured relationship, and in the five-part mini-series "Avengers Prime" he cooked up a doozy, an epic story in which our heroes are suddenly transported to the mystic realm formerly occupied by Asgard, a mystic realm now in chaos and being taken over by Hela, the goddess of death. Our heroes are separated, and much sound and fury ensues, and eventually they come together and face off against the forces of Hela - artist Alan Davis has never done better work than in this series, and in this final issue he presents us with a truly wonderful two-page spread of what death's army might look like if it were run through a Wagner-filter:



I admit, I pay much more attention to visuals than to writing in comics, but even so, this issue also has a perfect little moment of character-work. It comes at the end, when an abashed Tony Stark is trying to apologize to Captain America for everything - the superhero registration business, the 'Civil War,' all of it: "All of those things ... all the things I said, and did ...I'm ... I'm so, so sorry. I know that's not enough, but I hope you will allow me the chance to earn your friendship  back. I don't deserve it ... I just hope you let me. I'm not half as good at ... at anything as I am when I'm doing it next to you." It's trite, but somehow it works - a line that effectively summarizes Bendis' entire writing career.

And if the events of the "Civil War" cast a dark shadow on the future of Marvel Comics, that's nothing compared to the events that sprang from the mini-series "House of M" (which I praised here despite the objections of Kevin the Noted Comic Book Snob!), in which the tormented hero Scarlet Witch used her reality-altering powers to wipe out nine-tenths of all the mutants in the Marvel Universe. In her agony to make everything simpler, she speaks three fateful words, "No more mutants" - and suddenly the Marvel continuity contains just a handful of mutants struggling to survive as a species. That was years ago, and again, many very good stories have come out of that premise - but there was always going to come some kind of reckoning, and it's looking like Marvel's fantastic mini-series "Children's Crusade" will be that reckoning.

The series is written with acute sensitivity by Allan Heinberg and drawn with eye-popping virtuosity by the great Jim Cheung (in a perfect Steve-world, he would be drawing the teenaged-Legion every month, but I'll take what I can get), and it tells the story of what would happen if two young heroes named Wiccan and Speed - a shy (and gay) sorcerer and a brash young super-speedster - became convinced that a) somehow the Scarlet Witch was their mother, and b) that she was alive somewhere and they should find her. This naturally aligns forces against them - mainly the Avengers, who don't want these kids to blunder into a cataclysm - and forces in their favor, mainly their fellow teen allies on the Young Avengers, but also joined by Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch's brother, and Magneto, the father of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Their search eventually takes them to Latveria and a confrontation with none other than Doctor Doom - a confrontation that prompts Cheung to give us a wonderful double-page spread of his own:



In this issue, part 4 of a 9-part story, this series finally comes into its own as the premiere slam-bang event of the entire Marvel line in 2011. The Scarlet Witch has no memory of the terrible things she did in her previous life - she believes she's simple Latverian gypsy girl Wanda Maximoff, and Heinberg has added the perfect Stan Lee-style twist: Doctor Doom, the monarch of Latveria, has fallen in love with her ("Given my history," he wryly tells Wiccan, "even I find it difficult to believe"). He thinks its sheer lunacy for Wiccan to want to revive her memories - and with them her devastating powers - but the decision might be taken out of his hands anyway, since shortly after Wiccan shows up to 'rescue' his 'mother,' both the Young Avengers (with Quicksilver and Magneto) show up and the Avengers, who are determined to prevent another 'House of M' style catastrophe.

This issue is full of great moments, but for my money, the best of them is the confrontation between Wolverine (who is, for reasons known only to the Marvel Accounting Department, now an Avenger) and poor befuddled Wanda. Wolverine has always had only one simple solution in mind for the whole problem of what the Scarlet Witch did to her fellow mutants: kill her before she can do anything worse - and in the longshot hope that her death will restore the reality she changed - and for one more reason: out of simple revenge for a nearly-successful genocide. Wiccan can't understand such a mentality:

"What is wrong with you? You're supposed to be one of the good guys."

"So was she. Until she slaughtered her friends and wiped out an entire species with three little words ... 'no more mutants,' right Wanda? Well, you got your wish, sweetheart. Thanks to you, there's only a few of us left. And now, thanks to me, there's about to be one less."

Needless to say, he's stopped from killing her, and the issue provides a cliffhanger ending, and the story keeps barreling along. I know I shouldn't be allowing myself to enjoy it as much as I am - probably issue #9 will take a year to ship - but I can't help it! If this series continues as it's going, it'll be the best thing Marvel's done in years. I'll keep you posted.

Comics! Three Number Ones!

Comics this week included three first issues spanning two thousand years of super-heroics. First issues don’t mean as much these days as they once did, but I can’t help but get a little excited about them even so – they represent such potential to be squandered!

The first issue of DC’s new limited series “Legacies” takes us back to the very beginnings of that company’s super-hero scene: World War Two is about to break open, and gangsters are running the streets of America’s cities. Suddenly, ‘mystery men’ are appearing – The Crimson Avenger, the Atom, the Sandman … swathing themselves in mist, using their fists and guns to bring crime-waves to a halt. The artwork is done by Andy Kubert (with inks by his legendary father Joe), but that’s the only reason to check in with this first issue (apparently, different creative teams will handle different issues). For better or worse, the ‘dawn of superheroes’ story-bar was set incredibly high by “Marvels” - hell, even Marvel’s own “Marvels Project” hasn’t been able to equal that earlier classic, and despite having a much, much grander story to tell, “Legacies” doesn’t even come close. Yet, at least.



The first issues move into the present day with “Avengers” #1, a confused, over-talky jumble of an issue that was probably supposed to compensate for its glaring weaknesses by brandishing the fact that it’s written by fan favorite Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by fan favorite John Romita Jr. (although the JRJR cover is easily the worst he’s ever done in his entire career). It starts with Steve Rogers solemnly telling about thirty super-heroes that he needs them – they all have slightly different reactions, but that’s OK, because we don’t see most of them again in this issue. Instead, we cut to a dinner/reception where Steve Rogers is again christening a new Avengers team, but this one is much smaller, a core team that makes almost no tactical sense at all (there’s Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Spider-Archer, Spider-Wolverine, Bucky … and, in case the team encounters any, you know, super-villains, Thor and Iron Man). This team is attacked in the middle of their first meeting by Kang the …

…. sorry, I nodded off. Yes, this new Avengers team is attacked in their first issue by Kang the Conqueror, in a gambit that seems insane even for Bendis. To put it mildly, Kang is over-used as a go-to Avengers bad guy (he was even the inaugural villain for the young Avengers, for pete’s sake). He tells our heroes that their ‘children’ will be responsible for unleashing an untold horror on the human race, and he enlists their help to come forward in time and prevent that from happening. This is obviously a job for the aforementioned Young Avengers, but that doesn’t seem to occur to Bendis, so we’re off to the races next issue. Fans of Bendis and JRJR will continue to buy the run – Bendis will be on it for about six issues, and if history is any guide, Romita penciled his last issue before this one even went on sale (this issue has a prose backup feature describing the origin of the Avengers …. It’s violently uninteresting, so we’ll skip it for now).



We jump forward thousands of years for our third first issue, a new #1 for the venerable Legion of Super-Heroes. The draw here isn’t the fairly good artwork by Yildiray Cinar (which certainly sounds like a Legion name – it’s not revealed in this issue what U.P. planet he’s from – my bet is Bismoll) but rather the return to Legion-scribing duties of Paul Levitz, who wrote some of the team’s greatest adventures about fifty years ago and is therefore presumed to have a solid grasp of what makes the Legion tick. There are two drawbacks to this theory: first, this Legion is composed of ragged-looking adults rather than the sexy teenagers Levitz last wrote about, and second, this series springs directly from a story-arc over in “Superman” a couple of years ago, which makes this issue feel just about as heavily c0ntinued as “Avengers” #1 did. Needless to say, good first issues shouldn’t feel heavily continued from something else – their whole point is to clear the clutter from the stage and start things fresh. Instead, the plot of this issue mostly revolves around the potential rehabilitation of the villain of that Superman mini-series, a xenophobic bigot code-named Earth-Man.

The issue was largely uninteresting despite two distinctly high-octane surprises, but DC’s background strategy here is certainly working on this long-time Legion fan: I’m perfectly willing to stick around and give Levitz the benefit of the doubt.

Still, for not one, not two, but three first issues to have this little oomph between them …

Comics: Dark Reign Ends!

Comics this week feature the culmination of Marvel’s “Dark Reign” saga, and the issues we’ll be examining – Siege #4, Dark Avengers #16, and the double-sized Finale of New Avengers – gave me immense satisfaction not only in the usual ways, with interesting writing and some great artwork, but also in the sweetest of all possible ways: by playing right into my ‘I told you so’ factor.

As those of you who’ve been following four-color superhero comics (or merely those of you who’ve been following their highlights here at Stevereads) already know, the premise of “Dark Reign” is alluringly simple: what if evil won? Not just ‘won’ in terms of successfully robbing a bank, but ‘won’ in the sense of ‘set up shop and ran things’ – that was the idea behind installing ‘Green Goblin’ psychopathic killer Norman Osborn as head of the super-police force known as H.A.M.M.E.R. and having him create his own team of Avengers consisting of fellow super-villains in disguise. The real avengers were either dead or fugitives in hiding from Osborn and his troops, and the government had passed a Super-Hero Registration Act compelling all super-heroes to register with the government and play by federal rules.

Although of course initially I wasn’t a fan of this whole concept, I quickly came around. It produced some really good stories, and Marvel put some top-notch creative people in charge of keeping the whole thing going. I was so entertained I wasn’t sure I wanted to see the eventual heroes-return storyline I knew was coming.



The four-part mini-series Siege is that storyline, and I’d have read it no matter what, since it’s drawn by the great, the mighty Oliver Coipel. And it’s been thrilling – and notoriously violent. Osborn, apparently drunk with power (and egged on by Loki, the evil Norse god of mischief), decided to muster all his super villains and all his troops and invade the fabled city of Asgard, which at the time was floating about twenty feet above Braxton, Oklahoma. The invasion was led by Osborn’s leashed superman, the mentally unbalanced superhero Sentry, and in Siege’s most widely discussed panel, Coipel draws the Sentry ripping apart Ares, the Greek god of war, like an old T-shirt. The end of the previous issue had Norman Osborn flying into a Green Goblin-style spittle-flecking rant – on national TV – about how he was the only thing stopping the Sentry from going completely bonkers and annihilating all life on Earth. Osborn no sooner finishes saying this than we lay eyes on the Sentry floating above our heroes, only he’s swapped his heroic blue cape for a bunch of muscular red tentacles.

So this issue opens with a fight even our assembled heroes can’t really win – as Osborn puts it, the Sentry has become the ‘Angel of Death,’ and the life-sucking Void he has at his command quickly paralyzes his enemies. Help comes from the most unlikely source: Loki, who’s apparently sorry things have gone so far and tries to make them right again, by using his mystical abilities to infuse the fallen heroes with new vitality.

The Sentry senses this, attacks Loki, and proves that he hasn’t exactly got all the god-shredding out of his system.


Coipel gives us some great action panels – pride of place go to Thor and Iron Man – and eventually our heroes are victorious. The Void is vanquished, and its poor slob of a human host is killed (in a neat touch, Thor gives his body a suitably epic Viking incineration – in the sun, no less), and with any luck, that’ll be the last anybody ever hears of the Sentry, one of the dumbest ideas to come out of Marvel Comics since the Spider-clone.

The issue ends with Steve Rogers refusing to take up the mantle of Captain America but agreeing to fulfill some kind of leadership role in the upcoming ‘Heroic Age.’ There’s celebration in the air: the Registration Act has been ‘thrown out,’ the fugitive heroes can come out of hiding, and the villains who were running the show are either captured or in hiding themselves.



This ties into the double-sized finale of New Avengers, which shows our fugitive team – Luke Cage, Hawkeye as Ronin, Mockingbird, Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Bucky as Captain America – in one last covert adventure together, with Brian Michael Bendis putting in plenty of his snarky, chatty dialogue and Brian Hitch doing the artwork with the increasingly incoherent sloppiness that is coming to mark his current work. At the end of that issue, we’re told again that the good guys win- the Registration Act is dismissed, Osborn and his cronies are going to jail, the sun is shining again.



Switch scenes to Dark Avengers #16, written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Mike Deodato (with more – a lot more – of that weird computerized inking and coloring he’s been fooling around with lately), which brings to an end the main storyline of a comic I never thought I’d like and ended up eagerly awaiting every month (and not only for Deodato’s beautiful artwork). This was the central book of “Dark Reign” – this was the fake Avengers team Osborn assembled and held together through force of will, and it made for compelling reading, month after month.

In this issue, it’s all over: the team is beaten and disbanded, war criminals, and Osborn himself is going to the prison to which he sent so many heroes during his quasi-legal reign of terror. And in his typically mind-gaming way, Bendis puts in Osborn’s mouth the perfectly-articulated rationale for everything he did, and you got to have it in its entirety:

I was right.

The world is a mess, and the world needed me to fix it. And I would have. I could have.

This world is a madhouse of mutants, terrorists, psychotics, aliens, and monsters. All of them chasing and crashing into each other every second of every day. People put on costumes and just decide, all by themselves, that they are the savior of the world. That it’s okay for them to go and do whatever the hell they want to whoever they want because they have a costume.

Well, I am telling you the world is going to end. One day soon, it’s going to actually explode. The wrong creature is going to slam into the wrong mutant and boom. That will be it. All of this – all of it will have been for nothing. All I wanted to do was stop it. All I wanted to do was fix the problems before they happened.

I KNOW the mutants of this world will rise up and kill us.

I KNOW that the Hulk will one day decide to destroy everything he sees.

I KNOW the Punisher will one day kill the wrong person and set off a chain of events that will lead to nuclear holocaust.

I know that these heroes will dive head first into something they do not understand and end up doing such insane damage to the world that humans can no longer live on it. Victor Von Doom will crush us under his foot in his last mad gasp of air. I know this is true. I know it.

And I could have stopped it. If not for the fact that you kept standing in my @#$@# way.

All of which sounds convincingly psychotic and creepy, and you’re ready to cheer the fact that the Green Goblin, the speaker of such creepy sentiments, is safely locked up.

The only problem is that Osborn isn’t the Marvel character who originated all those creepy sentiments, nor is he the Marvel character who organized them into a repressive, fascistic governmental policy.

That Marvel character would be Iron Man, the current darling of American movie theaters. The same Iron Man who helped to defeat the evil Sentry and who appears to be a founding member of whatever new Avengers team Steve Rogers is founding with the full blessing of the U.S. government. And that’s where the ‘I told you so’ factor comes in.

Because years ago, when this whole storyline started, when Iron Man and Reed Richards, responding to a super-hero accident in which many innocent lives were lost, decided to enunciate and then support the whole idea behind the Registration Act, I said this was one of those comic book ideas that sound great but probably shouldn’t be done because there’s literally no satisfying way to un-do them. Iron Man himself began hunting down his former allies among the superheroes. Iron Man beat up Captain America, and Reed Richards designed the massive gulag in which dissenters - good guys and bad guys – were locked up. And they both did it because they sincerely believed exactly those creepy sentiments Bendis puts in the mouth of the bad guy, Norman Osborn. Reading these comics this week, you’d assume the whole arc of “Dark Reign” was Osborn’s idea from the start – but the only reason Bendis would want you to assume that is because you have to forget the real causes of the whole story, because if you remember them, no Marvel ‘reset’ is ever possible, and no ‘Heroic Age’ can dawn.

The irony of quintessential ‘I told you so’ scenarios, of course, is that they bring no satisfaction. I knew that if Marvel ever wanted to bring their comics back to ‘normal,’ they’d have to do some major fudging with what had gone before, and I was right: that’s exactly what they did. This week, Iron Man and the others were victims of Norman Osborn’s mad paranoia about the dangers posed by unregulated super-powered beings. The good guys beat him, and now everything can go back to normal.

But normal in the Marvel Universe is still a place where whole city blocks in midtown Manhattan are blown up by warring super-folk, where somebody with powers really can put on a costume and decide who lives and who dies. In other words, we’re right back where we started two or three years ago.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you – at least, not much. The lineup of this new Avengers team strikes me as ridiculously opportunistic … there’s simply no reason to have Wolverine and Spider-Man on the Avengers other than to make Marvel money (kind of amazing that Deadpool didn’t get an invite), and that’s a little sad: one of the things I’ve always liked about the Avengers was that in addition to the headliners who had their own comics, we also got to see in action heroes like the Black Knight or the Vision who didn’t have books of their own. And I admit I’ll miss the subversive fun of Bendis’ Dark Avengers.

So: now we try out “The Heroic Age” and see what comes of it. All in all, Marvel pulled off quite an accomplishment in “Dark Reign” … they ought to commemorate it with a big hardcover slipcased volume of its best stories: the entire run of Dark Avengers, plus all the best related issues – most certainly including the death of the Punisher – and of course all four chapters of Siege. I’d buy it.

Comics: The Penultimates!

Marvel Comics served up two pivotal chapters in its “Siege” storyline this week – the penultimate chapter of “Dark Avengers” (a series in which psychotic government hatchet-man Norman Osborn, with duped official sanction, creates his own team of Avengers using bad guys costumed as good guys), and the penultimate chapter of “Siege” (a series in which the aforementioned Osborn and his ‘dark’ Avengers and their storm troopers launch a full-scale attack on the fabled city of Asgard, home of the Norse gods, which at the moment is hovering about twenty feet over some empty badlands in Oklahoma). The tension – as events that have been percolating for a couple of years now start to boil over – is extremely well-handled by all involved, and the feat of these two issues, which tell very closely interlinked stories in perfect cooperation, is, to put it mildly, not Marvel’s usual way of doing things.

“Dark Avengers” should be read first, if only for the enormous pleasure of seeing Norman Osborn’s secret ally finally revealed. Some of you may recall that I made a prediction about this ally’s identity waaay back when this whole adventure was starting, and I’m happy to admit I was wrong – happy mainly because the actual identity of that mysterious ally is so perfect, so plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face that I laughed a bit when it was revealed: I should have seen this, the simplest possible answer, coming.

Of course the secret ally is the same ultra-powerful secret ally Osborn’s always had: the super-strong energy-wielding Sentry – only in his Edward Hyde persona as ‘the Void.’ Brilliant.

In the previous issue, readers saw Norman Osborn talk the Sentry down from a tantrum in which he might have destroyed Manhattan, and in a moment of criminal insight worthy of the former Green Goblin, Osborn realizes that the Sentry’s terrified, traumatized wife might be the disruptive element in Osborn’s control over her husband. He orders his ‘dark’ Hawkeye (actually the murderous Daredevil villain Bullseye) to make Mrs. Sentry disappear.



In this issue that happens. Under the pretext of flying her to a safe house to wait out the current crisis, Bullseye gets her alone in an auto-piloted plane and proceeds with his trademark snide mind-games:

You’re husband, he’s almost a god – and you – you’re kind of, well, frumpy is the best word I can think of. I mean, he can have anybody.I mean, I can have anybody and all I do is kill people. And I swear, I can get any girl I want. Imagine the ass he’s missing out on because he’s married to you. And look at you. Do you even own a brush? Or a mirror?

This is great, ghoulish stuff, perfectly in character for everybody, despite how ugly those characters are. The issue’s only weird element comes not from the writing but from the artwork. Artist Mike Deodato has been doing the best work of his career on “Dark Avengers,” and that continues here (even the bare-bones horizontal sequence in which Bullseye kills Mrs. Sentry is a homage to the similar linearity other artists have used in some of Bullseye’s more famous murders in other comics), but every so often there are panels that were constructed entirely on a computer, and the contrast between them and Deodato’s regular work is jarring.



The issue segues perfectly into the big-scale goings-on in “Siege,” Marvel’s breakout hit (sales are running at almost three times Marvel’s own exuberantly pumped expectations), in which all Hell is breaking loose during the aforementioned Osborn invasion of Asgard. This issue features more fantastic Oliver Coipel artwork, and it’s a great thrill-ride, despite multiple oddnesses in the storytelling (one minute Thor is furiously fighting the Sentry, the next he’s calmly standing over a defeated Norman Osborn, for instance, and a newly-returned Iron Man (Tony Stark) is able to remotely shut down Osborn’s own super-armor even though we were specifically told many, many issues ago that Osborn had all the Stark-technology suits replaced with his own armor and weapons-tech).



We get some absolutely great, glad-you-waited-for-it moments, the best of which is certainly comes from the fact that writer Brian Michael Bendis remembered which Marvel character should have the payoff moment of finally decking Norman Osborn (and he gives that character a perfect line while doing it, a ‘real person’ line instead of a comic book slogan)(and there’s the fitting little image of Captain America putting a calming hand on his shoulder the moment after). And of course Coipel’s action-sequences are spectacular, especially the fight – such as we see of it – between Thor and the Sentry. When Coipel draws Thor hammering the Sentry with lightning, you can practically feel it (and he’s one of the only working artists who could have convincingly portrayed what happens to the city of Asgard in this issue). But for me, the neatest such little moment passes so quick you almost don’t notice it: in the midst of the melee, Captain America and his former WWII sidekick Bucky are bantering, just as they did in the Jack Kirby-drawn comics of seventy years ago. I smiled.



Oddly, the issue is almost as full of missed moments too – after all, this is the issue where Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man are reunited on the same side after years of separation, alienation, and heartbreak, and yet in this issue they just take up fighting the bad guys with nary a word or look exchanged. I presume such payoff moments will come later, but considering the fact that five pages of this issue are a text-only backup feature, I wonder that room couldn’t have been found to work in just a single panel or two in the main issue, showing how these three react to seeing each other again.



But picky comics fans can’t have everything (!), and this issue delivers a lot, including a slam-bang cliffhanger that sets up what promises to be a very exciting conclusion. You can read all about that here when it ships to comic stores, I'm guessing  sometime in August.

Comics! Siege 2

A bunch of comics came out this week, but in the superhero world, only one of them mattered much, and it would matter even if it didn’t matter, if you know what I mean – because the writing features Brian Michael Bendis doing his choppy, impressionistic, weirdly beguiling thing with dialogue (he’s the best of the current bunch of ‘no exposition’ comics writers), and because it features the stunning, mind-warpingly great artwork of Olivier Coipel. These two could make Scrooge McDuck matter.

The series of course is “Siege” from Marvel, and naturally it matters for reasons other than its creative team, although it should be stressed that said team has seldom been in stronger form. No, this four-issue mini-series matters because it’s the culmination and climax of the company-wide “Dark Reign” story that’s been playing out in Marvel’s comics for the last few years. Some of you will already be familiar with that scenario (from previous Stevereads entries, if nothing else – just follow the tags!): Norman Osborn, the ersatz Green Goblin, has wormed his way into the country’s good graces and taken command of H.A.M.M.E.R., a gigantic paramilitary force of stormtroopers. And when he’s wearing his super-powered armor and going under the code-name Iron Patriot, he also commands his own team of Avengers, composed of villains dressed in hero costumes – plus the Sentry (think: Superman only biddable and psychotic) and Ares, the Greek god of war.

In the lead-up to “Siege,” as we’ve seen, Norman Osborn, manipulated by the evil norse god Loki (and drunk on power the old-fashioned way), has declared war on Asgard, the home city of the norse gods, which is currently floating above Oklahoma. Osborn talks about how the city forms a real and present threat to America just by being there, and in the first issue of “Siege” he gathers his troops and invades.

So “Siege” #2 starts off in the chaos of general battle, with Osborn’s troops and Avengers fighting a city full of enraged and not all that out-gunned Asgardians (swords and spears are pretty damn effective if you’re super-strong, which every single Asgardian is). Coipel’s pencils are magnificent – he’s able to convey the huge sweep of what’s going on without taking any drama away from the one-on-one encounters throughout the book, the first of which is key to this issue: the Asgardian warriors Balder and Heimdall convince Ares that he’s been duped, that Osborn is really his enemy.



There’s other stuff going on in this issue, but that’s the core story: Ares turns on Osborn, knocks him out of the sky, and is about to cut his head off when the Sentry intervenes, beats the stuffing out of Ares, and then, well … takes him out of the fight entirely, let’s say. The issue ends with Osborn unleashing the Sentry on Thor, Asgard’s greatest warrior and resident super-hero – and with Osborn himself coming under attack by none other than Captain America, alive again and fighting mad, leading his own group of reinforcements into battle. It’s a great cliffhanger ending to a great issue, but it leaves me wondering two things:

First: if Bendis is going to portray the Sentry as so powerful – able to dispatch the god of war with relative ease, likely to pound the stuffing out of Thor in the next issue – then why would Osborn need this mysterious reserve operative he’s been darkly hinting about for the last year? We don’t know who that mysterious operative is (although if you follow the aforementioned tags, you’ll see where I made my own prediction, months and months ago – a prediction I’m sticking with), but he hardly seems Needed, if this is what Osborn’s pet psycho can do all by himself.

Second: Even at the breakneck pace this thing is developing, how can it possibly wrap up in only two issues? Captain America re-entering the fray; Thor fighting the Sentry, this mysterious operative entering the fray, Iron Man presumably showing up at some point … not to mention the fact that if long-term grudge-matches are going to be honored here, Spider-Man (currently just a background member of Cap’s reinforcements) should surely take pride of place, no? Osborn killed his beloved Gwen Stacey, after all! How Bendis can possibly resolve all this in only 50 more pages is beyond me.

But I’ll certainly be along for the ride. This issue erases all my slight misgivings about the first issue of this series: this is epic-style Marvel done just right.

Comics! Siege begins!

This week sees the first installment of Marvel Comics’ next Big Thing: a four-part series called Siege. The back story will be familiar to those of you who’ve been paying attention here at Stevereads – Norman Osborn, the murderous ersatz Green Goblin, has professed to be a changed man, wormed his way into the President’s good graces, and been placed in charge of the super paramilitary organization known as H.A.M.M.E.R. He’s recruited his own team of ‘dark’ Avengers, and for several months now readers have been treated to a surprisingly entertaining dystopian version of the usual Marvel continuity … the bad guys have been in charge, hunting down, torturing, and even killing the good guys.

It’s yielded some good stories, and one of the things that made those stories good was the background current of tension that’s been building the whole time. Norman Osborn has been written consistently as a smarmy psychopath with only a tenuous hold on his own sanity, and his team of Avengers have for the most part been written as unabashed scumbags. Readers like me have been both fascinated and appalled, and every month the prospect of Osborn’s fall from power – and the face-stomping his team of storm troopers so richly deserves – has grown just a little more delicious in the aniticpating.

Marvel’s in-house ads hint pretty strongly that Siege is the story of that downfall – that the core trio of the real Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, will reunite to bring about the return of the so-called Heroic Age Marvel’s been touting lately. We’ll see if that turns out to be true, but in the meantime, this issue opens with a bang.

Bang as in explosion. Osborn and the evil Norse god Loki conspire to orchestrate an catastrophic incident involving a bunch of energy-wielding bad guys and one Volstagg, a warrior who’s left the fabled city of Asgard (which now floats ten feet above some empty scrubland in Oklahoma, as seen in last year’s new run of Thor’s own comic) in search of adventure. The catastrophic incident involves a crowded football stadium, and Osborn uses its aftermath to justify launching a full-scale invasion of Asgard, spearheaded by his own super-powered shock troops. That invasion is launched in this first issue, which is written by Brian Michael Bendis in his usual spastic way and gloriously illustrated by Olivier Coipel.



Osborn’s surveillance intelligence tells him Thor is not in Asgard at the moment (readers of Thor’s own book will recall that, for the millionth time, he’s been exiled from his hometown), so his hopes of success are high. His ‘dark’ Avengers move in with Air Force fighter jets and catch the Asgardians by surprise, and the fighting is in full fury when Thor does indeed show up – only to get rather unceremoniously knocked around by the bad guys. The issue ends with things looking fairly bleak for Asgard.

The two main problems that usually afflict comic book Big Things are a) inconsistent characterization of the major players, or b) incoherent plotting, and Bendis avoids both those pitfalls in this first issue, and he does quite a bit right besides. The elements are in place here for a tremendously satisfying story – not only the prospect of Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man reuniting but also the classic overreaching Osborn has been doing all along, culminating in this issue when he angrily delegates to an assistant the task of telling the President that he’s going to invade Asgard (“I’m done talking to that man,” he snarls, and a later scene in the White House makes it clear the President feels the same about him). And certainly attacking an entire city full of warrior gods can be classified as overreaching.

So: a fine strong premise-issue (marred only by the inclusion of some script-pages for a fairly pivotal scene in which Osborn explains his decision to his Avengers – no explanation is given as to why Coipel didn’t draw these pages, like he did the rest of the issue), and the ball is Bendis’ to fumble. My fingers are crossed that he doesn’t.

Comics! The week's highs and lows!

It's an odd thing, dealing with the creative output of a company like Marvel Comics. This is an outfit that's done more over the last 50 years to rejuvenate comics and update them for adults than any other force in the industry, and yet it's a company that so often has its collective head up its ass that you feel like you should get a complimentary bed-pan with every week's subsciptions.

That's as true today as it ever was, and it's the same old problems: convoluted continuity, creators who don't ever talk with each other, people writing flagship titles while deeply, deeply stoned, etc. You can find some of the same faults over at Marvel's long-time competitor DC Comics, but Marvel has a few besetting problems that are peculiar to itself. One is that they have an abiding affection for sprawling, multi-part multi-title mega-stories despite having almost no talent for pulling them off, and another is that they've got a yearning to be badass that's so overriding it's creepy. Both these problems have an understandable genesis: DC. DC Comics does the sprawling, multi-part multi-title mega-story thing with consummate skill (OK, even they can have misfires - nobody around here will be rushing out to buy Absolute Trinity, if they're crazy enough to make such a thing). And as far as badass goes, DC Comics has Batman. Nuff said.

Surprisingly, however, one of the sprawling multi-part multi-title mega-stories Marvel's currently doing is actually making for extremely compelling reading (the other involves lots and lots of zombies and typifies everything that's wrong with Marvel creatively). I'm talking about the whole "Dark Reign" storyline, in which the United States government, in the wake of a nearly successful alien invasion, has turned over its vast military/homeland security/superhero watchdog agencies to Norman Osborn, formerly the Spider-Man arch-villain Green Goblin and now a suit-wearing media-manipulating clandestine dictator. In the old days, this kind of plot would have been carried on for six issues of the Avengers and then resolved, and Marvel's genius this time around is to keep the whole thing going, to expand and explore its possibilities. Osborn has cynically created his own team of Avengers (after first banishing and now secretly hunting the leftovers of the original team, some of whom are holed up in a hiding place in Brooklyn) and his own team of X-Men (after the genuine items withdraw to an island in San Francisco Bay) and sold them to the American people as the real thing, despite the fact that several members of his teams are just super-criminals wearing hero costumes ('Hawkeye' is secretly lethal Daredevil villain Bullseye, Spider-Man is secretly monstrous Spidey-villain Venom, etc). A nice added touch is that Osborn leads the team himself, wearing super-powered armor and calling himself Iron Patriot.

The various titles and spin-offs of this whole 'Dark Reign' story have been almost without exception fascinating, showing our exiled heroes in some new lights - as overpressured underdogs in constant fear of incarceration - and every month, in "Dark Avengers," giving us a surprisingly entertaining foray into life inside a team composed of sociopaths who hate each other and are mostly kept in line by Osborn's dark charisma. Sad but true: the actual heroic Avengers often weren't written with this kind of wry intelligence.



One of the key details supporting the whole storyline is Norman Osborn's assemblage of raw physical power. If his hand-picked enforcers weren't able to smack down their scattered opposition, that opposition would simply re-take control. Preventing this took some skillful choosing on the part of "Dark Reign"s various writers, and they provided Osborn with a team that includes Wolverine's beclawed natural son, the aforementioned Bullseye, the super-powered psychiatrist Moonstone, the unstoppable but mentally unstable Sentry, and Ares, the Greek god of war. The idea is to make the scattered good guys inferior in every way - not just tactically and financially but physically as well - in a direct one-on-one fight with Osborn's Dark Avengers, they'd get their asses whupped and be locked up or worse. Readers are encouraged to think the same holds true for the X-Men, and that brings us to the mini-series Exodus, which wraps up this week with the one thing you'd think its writer, Matt Fraction, would go out of his way to avoid: the aforementioned direct one-on-one fight, this time between the X-Men and BOTH Osborn's teams, the Dark Avengers and the Dark X-Men.

Granted, this is the series' big finish, so maybe it's natural Fraction wanted to go for the gold. But there's a skill to writing - orchestrating - a big multi-part battle, and geez, how many times does Fraction have to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't have that skill before he's forbidden to try it again?

So the big fight is a mess, in so many places I be here all day listing them. Fraction clearly had half a dozen little scenes in mind he thought would be 'cool,' and what happens outside of those scenes, well ... it's only a funny book, right? Yeesh.

So we have Norman Osborn blasting Cyclops two or three times with ray-beams at point-blank range, but Cyclops suffers no damage worse than ripped clothing. So we have Angel scooping up Hawkeye/Bullseye and depositing him across the bay in Marin County (rather than simply dropping him in the water, perhaps from 600 feet in the air), for no apparent reason. So we have Emma Frost entering the Sentry's troubled mind in order to release his inner demons and cause him to fly away from Earth in a blur (rather than simply render him unconscious). So we have Moonstar 'borrowing' powers from "Mistress Hela" sufficient to bring Ares to his knees, but without any explanation of what those powers are. So we see what looks like an evil version of Weapon Alpha get his kidneys and spine punctured by Wolverine


and still be up and fighting several panels later. And so - when it all ends in a truce and the Dark Avengers withdraw - we see Norman Osborn's team at a press conference: Sentry's back and seems none the worse for wear, Ares OK, Hawkeye/Bullseye just fine despite having last been seen fighting Angel to the death over in Marin County, evil Weapon Alpha guy OK, not a Band-aid in sight ... it's enough to make anybody who cares about panel-by-panel common sense throw up their hands in despair, or maybe just throw up.



Things aren't much better in the first issue of another "Dark Reign" spin-off series, "Avengers - the List." In this issue, the real Hawkeye, Clint Barton, one of those exiled Avengers hiding in Brooklyn, decides enough is enough: as long as Osborn is alive, the evil days onto which the whole Marvel Universe has fallen will continue. So Hawkeye decides he will arm himself, do some recon, break into Avengers Tower, and kill Osborn. His lame-ass teammates do some moral dickering with him (this dialogue is written by Brian Michael Bendis, who very often does very much better work - but then, I suppose one of the whole points of "Dark Reign" is that we aren't seeing our heroes at their best), and then he heads off. Artist Marko Djurdjevic provides a nice brooding two-page shot of Barton looking over the Brooklyn Bridge at his brightly-lit target

but what follows doesn't make any more sense logistically than Fraction's Exodus finale. Not only would Hawkeye's teammates never let him go off and attack Osborn's stronghold alone (if for no other reason than that his inevitable capture would jeopardize their own safety) - as it is, they just sit around lame-assedly saying "he's going to get killed" (not quite as catchy as "Avengers Assemble!" is it?), but Hawkeye himself wouldn't do it, for the simple reason that he'd know he had no chance of success.

So I suppose it's thrilling how close Bendis brings him to success (although what constitutes success here - breaking into Osborn's office and shooting him dead with a shotgun blast - raises a snotload of problems on its own, since it's what villains traditionally do). He handles Venom with ease, shoots the fake Hawkeye several times non-lethally, and gets as far as Osborn's office before he's beaten senseless by Ares. I'm guessing the next issue will feature a) Osborn torturing Hawkeye for information about his teammates, and b) those teammates attempting to rescue him from Osborn's clutches, but I'm hoping Bendis will also address the virus of stupidity that seems to be afflicting Marvel's heroes now that they're down and out - this is like the third storyline in which one of those heroes, alone, has tried to assault or infiltrate Osborn's tower, been unsuccessful, and barely escaped. Whatever happened to teamwork?

(Of course, I'm willing to endure all these little gripes if the whole "Dark Reign" concept is eventually going to lead to the mother of all superhero-revenge storylines ... the thing practically writes itself at this point, and it would be extremely satisfying, if done well ....)




Fortunately, writer Fred Van Lente over in "Spider-Man" lightens things up with the week's single best panel/bit of dialogue. In that title, Spidey-hating blowhard J. Jonah Jameson has become mayor of New York City and dedicated his every waking moment to hunting down his web-spinning arch-nemesis. At one point in this issue, when some of Jameson's jackbooted goons are shooting at him, Spider-Man yells, "How can you listen to him? I mean, look at his mustache! It's just like Hitler's!"


Hee.

But it's over in DC Comics that we get the week's sweetest moment, courtesy of Geoff Johns in the second issue of "Adventure Comics." In that issue, Ma Kent cooks supper for Superboy as he has a delicate conversation with Wonder Girl about their relationship, and when the two young people finally kiss (in mid-air, naturally), a watching Ma Kent says to herself, "Good boy," and wistfully touches a photograph of herself and her dear dead husband, Pa Kent, in younger days. It's a well-done little grace note in a title that's very deliberately taking its time, so we'll end with that. But tune in next week when we take in another batch of funny books and see what makes them tick!

Comics! Secret Invasion: Dark Reign!

Well, the mega-crossover-event that has convulsed the entire line of Marvel Comics for the last few months, the "Secret Invasion" storyline, is now over. For those of you who quite rightly abandoned the whole mess early on, it goes something like this: the evil shape-changing alien Skrulls find a way to flawlessly mimic several dozen Earth people (including several superheroes and super-villains) in preparation for a full-on invasion of Earth. Innumerable plot complexities follow, and in the end Earth repels the invasion - with two big pieces of fallout: first, Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) resigns as head of the uber-governmental agency S.H.I.E.L.D., and second, arch-bad guy Norman Osborn (whom my generation knew as the villainous - and thoroughly dead Green Goblin) gets the job and becomes, essentially, the most powerful man in the world.

Once he gets the job, he does what any reputable super-baddie would do: he convenes a table-full of the world's other super-baddies, raises his glass, and says, "Gentlemen - to evil!"

Not really, but damn close enough. He summons a choice roster of guests: Emma Frost, the mind-reading mutant White Queen and current leader of the X-Men, Doctor Doom, deposed ruler of Latveria and long-time arch-nemesis of the Fantastic Four, some gun-toting loser named The Hood (apparently, he's the new leader of the underworld gangs once ruled by the Kingpin), Loki, the now-female (formerly male) evil Asgardian god, and Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner. And he makes these guests an offer he hopes they can't refuse: in exchange for 'hitting' whatever he wants hit, no questions asked, he'll use his newfound power to give them whatever they want - Doom wants to be restored to power in Latveria? Done! Emma Frost wants to keep her fellow mutants out of concentration camps? Done! The Hood wants his thieves and drug-runners to operate free of restrictions? Done! Loki wants to rule Asgard? Done!



Yah, the whole thing screeches to a halt right there, doesn't it? I know, I know - I noticed it right away too. But let's limp on a little anyway and come back to it later.

Anyhoo, Norman Osborn is nothing if not thoughtful. He tells his guests "We all know that our best moments have been private ones ... while our defeats have been very public. I say, instead of pushing against that fate, we embrace it. Let's keep our wins quiet. Let's keep our victories between us. Let's do it in a way that works to our strengths."

It's not a mutual admiration society he's gathered, however, and The Hood points out the natural problem: "OK, but say when it's time to pay the goblin, and we tell you to go @#$% yourself, because that is, historically, what we do ..."

Osborn has a response ready: he gestures to a shadowy figure in the doorway, his "friend," and threatens that anybody who doesn't play ball will get a dire visit from that individual. He asks Emma Frost to read his mind and verify that he's telling the truth, and she does, but neither he nor she nor writer Brian Michael Bendis feels compelled to blurt out the "friend"'s name, so we never find out who that person is. All we know is that Osborn thinks it's someone who could threaten even a Norse god. The meeting breaks up shortly after that implied threat, with nobody in formal agreement with anybody else about anything.

The comparison is explicitly obvious, of course. This one-shot issue is supposed to be a mirror image to Bendis' 'Illuminati' series of a year ago, in which the secret leaders of the good guys gather around a table to cut deals and exchange gossip. 'Illuminati' and 'Dark Reign' have two things in common: Prince Namor, who's on both rosters (this is fascinating, despite the fact that Maleev here draws Namor as a bald, unshaven homeless man), and .... a fairly large degree of implausibility.


With the heroes, the implausibility wasn't quite so bad, but with the villains, it rises to nuisance level. Doctor Doom, for instance, doesn't just want Latveria back - he wants the world, and he doesn't want to share it with the likes of Norman Osborn. And as powerful as Doom is, he's even more arrogant (and fearless) - there isn't a character in the Marvel universe who could be invoked as Osborn's mysterious 'friend' who would intimidate him into cooperation. And Emma Frost doesn't just read minds - she also controls them, which would again be bad news for this 'friend.'

And that brings us back to Loki. The Asgardian god with the ability to turn Norman Osborn and everybody else in the room into toadstools - and the ability to flawlessly mimic them, should she/he ever feel like doing so. This Loki says she wants to rule Asgard, and Norman Osborn tells her they want the same thing - but what the heck could he do to even begin bringing it about, except maybe cast an absentee ballot? And what possible coercion could he bring to bear against a god, to keep her in line?

I'm worried that there's only one answer to that question: another god. I'm worried that Osborn's mysterious 'friend' is Thor (or worse, much worse, Odin). I'll just have to pray I'm wrong.

A slew of new titles and story lines are going to spring from this one-shot, and if Marvel's success rate recently is any indication, they'll all suck like a kid on a crazy-straw. The basic concept is fascinating: what if the bad guys were running the show for a change. And the story lines that should result would be great. We shall see.

House of M

Our book today is the Marvel Comics graphic novel House of M, which would more properly make it a subject for our esteemed colleague Gianni over at The Latest Issue, but we can't help ourselves. The more we re-read this book, the more convinced we become that it's the best thing Marvel's put before its readers since Marvels came out a decade ago. This book's storyline was the last gasp of the grand old Marvel style, a style that played out bittersweet Stan Lee style 'what if's against a backdrop of decidely unglamorous heroism.

Some of you will need some backstory. You can dig around on Gianni's site for it (we assure you, his postings are more enjoyable the second time through), but we'll provide a quick thumbnail sketch here in case any of you are too lazy to click over and do the requisite hunting.

One of Marvel's master villains is Magneto, an Eastern Eurpopean Holocaust survivor, a mutant with complete control over Earth's magnetic fields and a fanatic who believes, ironically enough, that mutants constitute nature's true master race. Non comic-fans among you will know the character's name because he was brought to masterful, indelible life on the big screen by Ian McKellan, clearly having the time of his life.

In the comics, Magneto had two children, both mutants like himself: his hot-headed son Pietro, codename Quicksilver, who can run at fantastic speeds, and Wanda, codename the Scarlet Witch, who can cast reality-altering 'hexes.' Magneto is a thorough-going bad guy (he wants his species to succeed, after all! What else could he be? It's a well known scientific fact that homo sapiens gained ascendancy over Neanderthals - and half a dozen other species of modern human - through diplomacy and tea parties), but Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, after a rocky start, become full-fledged heroes, members of the Avengers, Earth's most prestigious superhero team. Quicksilver can't travel anywhere near as fast as DC's Flash, and the Scarlet Witch at first can only cast three 'hexes' at a time before becoming exhausted, but there they are, mutants, fighting alongside Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor against all manner of threats to Earth's very survival. Full-fledged four-color heroes, but it wasn't destined to stay that way.

The Scarlet Witch fell in love with the Vision, the Avengers' android member, and because these stories are written piecemeal by many different writers - some significantly brighter than others - there came a storyline in which she became pregnant and gave birth to twins.

Well, of course future writers had to deal with That. An android and a mutant? Obviously, those children, who couldn't have been conceived in the tried-and-true birds-and-bees method, had to be accounted for somehow. Hack writer John Byrne made an attempt twenty years ago, chalking it all up to the machinations of an extra-dimensional demon, but that was never very convincing. Years and years later, our present writer Brian Michael Bendis came up with an entirely better scenario: it turns out that the Scarlet Witch's probability-altering hex-spheres were always more powerful than she or we knew, little bubbles in which her subconscious got to rewrite reality itself. She wanted children, and so she made them, and what was the harm?

Except that in the comic book world, if you're a woman, you always lose control of such awesome power, and the Scarlet Witch is no exception. And when she loses control of her ability (than which there can be, realistically speaking, none greater), all Hell breaks loose. In an Avengers story that need not delay us long here, she loses control and several Avengers - Ant-man, the Vision, and Hawkeye - die as a result. But all along she's aware of what she's doing to her friends, and it agonizes her. When the surviving Avengers converge on her, she offers no resistance - but her father Magneto shows up and demands the custody of his daughter. And since this particular team's roster has no Thor to challenge a being of Magneto's power, they stand by and let him take Wanda away to the ruins of his mutant state of Genosha. But all parties concerned know this is not the end of the matter.


This is where House of M - written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Olivier Coipel - begins. The book opens in the ruins of Genosha, on such a subdominant note as might a great symphony begin: two old friends, battered by time and circumstance, are talking on a shattered rooftop. The one is Magneto, but old and broken, without his metal helmet and scarlet cloak, rangy hair hanging in his face. The other is Charles Xavier, erstwhile leader of the X-men and the world's greatest telepath. These two have been the closest friends and the most bitter enemies, and Bendis' dialogue is a marvel of workaday compression. We can't keep drugging her and psychically putting her to sleep, Xavier wearily tells his old friend. It's inhumane. And it's hardly foolproof. And it's barely working.

I put my children through hell because of what I believe, Magneto confesses. I destroyed whatever hope they ever had, at a decent life ... because of what I believe. My war against the humans. And the truth is - I waged my war against the humans and I lost. And now I've lost my war and my children.

They're talking about Wanda, of course, who's been removed from the battlefield but still remains the prize of it: a biddable young woman who shapes and reshapes reality itself to her whim. Xavier and Magneto know she can't control her power, and Xavier - at least in front of her grieving father - can propose no alternative to what they're aleady trying.

But there are others no less involved, and when Xavier turns to them, this fantastic story starts in earnest. Because of course the two other groups of people concerned with the fate of the Scarlet Witch are the Avengers, her former teammates, and the X-Men, her fellow mutants. Xavier calls an extraordinary gathering of the two groups, telling them, I have made this special trip to New York to discuss with you an almost impossible matter. We need to decide the fate of Wanda Maximoff.

It's a mixed group he's talking to - there are idealists like Spider-Man, moralists like Captain America, and cold-hearted pragmatists like former villainess telepath Emma Frost and perennial fan favorite Wolverine. It's the latter two who immediately answer Xavier's question with hard reality: the Scarlet Witch must die. Someone do the math for me, Wolverine says, How many more of you does she have to kill before you snap out of it?

The rest of them aren't so sure, and eventually pity wins out and they decide to go to Genosha and try to talk to Wanda directly. But when they get there and approach her tower, the world goes white.

And when it resumes, it's radically changed. Mutants are no longer a feared and persecuted minority - they're the majority, walking openly among dwindling and well-treated humans. Emma Frost is a successful lawyer living in (where else?) Connecticut; Spider-Man, known openly as Peter Parker, is married to his childhood sweetheart and beloved of his Aunt May and Uncle Ben (the latter of course being alive in this world); Wolverine (and many others) are contended government agents; and then there's the biggest change of all: Magneto is no longer an outlaw master villain - instead, he's the internationally recognized leader of Genosha, ruling alongside his children and grandchildren - the House of M. At first glance, it looks like a mutant's paradise.

Naturally, it's Wolverine who starts to unravel it all (Bendis' only explanation is that Wolverine's had his memories altered so many times this new reality can't really take root ... ignoring what seems to us the more likely explanation, Wolverine's ever-present healing factor, constantly restoring him to 'normal'). He wakes in the arms of a woman he doesn't love, on a great government heli-carrier high above Manhattan, with flags of the House of M flying everywhere. In response, he does the only thing he can: he jumps overboard.

He survives the catastrophic landing, of course, thanks to his healing factor, and he immediately sets about learning the truth - i.e. stealing some mook's bike and going to Salem Center, to Graymalkin Lane: to the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, where the whole X-Man dream began. He finds it occupied by a normal suburban family who've never heard of Charles Xavier.

The government wants Wolverine back, and they send super-powered mutants to track and retrieve him. He's running from them when he's abducted by another group of super-powered mutants, this time a group of underground counter-agents who've monitored his escape and think he can help their cause.

The root of their cause is a little girl from Hell's Kitchen named Layla ("Like the song?" "No.") who can cause people to remember the previous reality and their lives in it. She's given each of these underground renegades that vision, and with Wolverine's help, they go looking for other recruits.

Their first stop is Connecticut, where they awaken Emma Frost. Bendis gives her reaction all the visceral punch he an, ably assisted by Coipel's enormously powerful visuals. With wild rage in her eyes, she growls:

House of Magnus! House of Magnus? Logan, we're gonna - we're going to find Magneto and oh! That is it! This is it! We're going to kill him! And his kids!

They awaken Cyclops too, but the real tragedy is still to come: Peter Parker. As long-time Marvel fans will know, the core set of Stan Lee/Jack Kirby characters from the 1960s have one thing in common: deep down, they'd rather not be heroes. With the possible exception of Thor (although even he would probably have preferred not being exiled from Asgard and physically bonded with a crippled surgeon), each of these core characters was turned to heroism by tragedy: the Fantastic Four (especially the Thing) want their normal lives back; Tony Stark wants his healthy heart back; Stephen Strange wants his surgeon's hands back; the mutants of course would like their afflictions lifted - but most of all, most heartbreakingly, there's Peter Parker, whose life is so full of tragedy that he can only benefit from the curse of the Scarlet Witch. His beloved uncle Ben is shot to death at the beginning of Peter's career as Spider-Man, and a little later his first great love Gwen Stacey dies during a pitched battle with the Green Goblin.

Say what you want about him, Bendis knows where his Marvel drama is to be found: the prolonged scene in which our renegades confront Peter Parker and awaken him is the most moving and harrowing sequence in the whole of the graphic novel. They find him out for a stroll with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben, his wife Gwen, and their little boy - long-time fans can't help but wince at the perfection of the picture that our renegades are duty-bound to rip apart.

And when they do, Peter's response is predictable: he freaks out worse than anyone has so far. But when Wolverine calms him down and gets him past the initial shock, what the normally-gentle Peter has to say is reminiscent of Emma Frost:

Logan, I swear to God ... I think I'm going to kill them. Magneto. His stupid daughter. I'm gonna kill them with my bare hands. I'm not ... I'm not going to be able to stop myself.

They organize (under the tactical leadership of Cyclops, since in this altered reality Steve Rogers was never frozen in suspended animation as Captain America and is a 100-year-old pensioner) and decide to take the fight directly to Magneto in Genosha. But before they do, some team-members voice classic Bendis misgivings (at least, they were once upon a time: these days it's sadly less in evidence):

My point is - when something of this magnitude happens - you have to step back for a second and and say: maybe this was time for this to happen. Who are we to decide how the world's supposed to be? When the meteors hit the earth and destroy a species - it's natural selection, right? Maybe this is how mutants become the next dominant species.

Misgivings or no, they go, interrupting the grand proceedings at Thunder Bay, where Lord Magneto is being joined by dignitaries from all over the world: King T'Challa of Wakanda, Princess Ororo of Kenya, a conspicuously unscarred Victor Von Doom of Latveria, King Namor of Atlantis ... and last of all, the House of Magnus itself: Magneto, Quicksilver, Wanda, the green-tressed Lorna Dane and the two little boys who are Magneto's grandsons - Coipel renders them all in pathetic Prussian splendor, the women with hair heavily bedangled, the men in epaulets with breastfuls of gaudy medals. It's when they first appear in all their finery that we're given our first clear visual clue that everything they stand for is not only corrupt but powerfully, quintessentially wrong.

Their grand gathering is terminally interrupted when Wolverine and his counter-insurgents crash the party. A furious fight ensues (as Cyclops tells his troops, they're literally fighting for everything), during which Doctor Strange discerns that the Wanda they're seeing isn't the real one - he spies a light on in her tower window and spirits himself up there to see her, finding her playing with her two little boys. As the fight rages below, Doctor Strange eventually discovers that the evil genius behind the Scarlet Witch's re-writing of history wasn't Magneto at all but Pietro her brother, and Bendis shows us the heart-breaking scene: the two of them, brother and sister against the world as always, the perfect coda to over forty years of watching these two conflicted characters in one incarnation after another. I'll take you from here, Quicksilver tells his sister.

Wanda: And they'll follow. No.

Quicksilver: I will fight them for you. I won't let them take you from me again. I won't -

Wanda: It's over.

Quicksilver: No.

Wanda: It should have ended months ago.

Then, a little later, in a perfectly-done sequence (Coipel's artwork here is very still and very heavily shadowed):

Quicksilver: We never had a chance. Magnus chose his 'mutant race' over us. We were just little kids, and he abandoned us. Even so - we fought so hard to get out from under it all.

Wanda: How was it supposed to be?

Quicksilver: We were supposed to be a family.

Wanda: Yes.

Quicksilver: We were supposed to be great heroes.

Wanda: We were, for a bit.

Quicksilver: I liked being an Avenger more than I ever said.

[for old-time fans, that line is worth the price of the whole graphic novel]

Wanda: Me too. And look what I did to them. I would do anything to take it back.

This line gives Pietro his horrible inspiration: he tells her she can take it back - that with her vast reality-altering powers and access to Xavier's vast telepathic powers, she could re-make the world so that they get all the things they've ever wanted. That was the genitive moment of the House of M.

Back in the present, the course of the battle has brought Magneto in contact with Layla, and when he learns that Quicksilver, in rewriting reality, also re-wrote him, his wrath is limitless: he effortlessly brings the battle to a halt - and then kills his son in a fit of rage. This shatters whatever tenuous hold Wanda had on sanity completely: she restores Pietro to life, and then in a wonderfully escalating monologue that wanderingly follows its own logic, she reacts to it all:

Look what you've done to us, daddy. Pietro was right - you - you ruined us before we even had a chance. Why would you treat your own children this way? Babies. Why? Because you actually think you're better than everyone else. The arrogance of you. You think because we're mutants we're better than them. That we deserve to rule. That's what you wanted and I gave it to you. But look ... look what it becomes. Even when you get what you want, you're still this horrible man. We're not the next step. We're not gods. We're freaks! Look at us, daddy! We're freaks! MUTANTS! You chose this over us and you RUINED us! Daddy ...

Off to one side, Emma Frost whispers, "Oh no ..."

Then Wanda says: "No more mutants."

And the world goes white again.

Bendis' storyline goes on from there to a final chapter in which everything has changed again: the world now has fewer than 200 mutants, and most of our central characters now remember vividly not one but three different realities. Marvel is still spinning out stories based on this new reality, some good some not so good. But House of M stands apart for its intelligence and old-fashioned Marvel might-have-been mucking around. We can scarcely imagine a better rendition of the essential tragedy of Magneto and his children, but we'll wait ten years and see if Marvel surprises us once again. In the meantime, comic book fans and non-fans alike have our strongest recommendation for this sad, bittersweet book.